Indulge Me
by lillianmorgan
Summary: Dawn and Spike trade a ghost story, both tempting and trying to scare the other one. Set early BtVS Season 5 between The Replacement and Into the Woods.


**Indulge Me**

Dawn folded her legs underneath her, trying to make the sitting on top of Spike's stone slab a bit more comfortable. He sat opposite, slurping happily at a mug of blood.

Spike constantly intrigued her. Everything he did was unique and interesting, and he never behaved like anyone else. Plus he let her stay in his crypt after school, or sometimes during, telling her old stories, reliving a bit of history with her. She had to admit she enjoyed his version of things much more than the textbooks she had to pour through for school.

An idea came into her head and she put voice to it. "What would you do if you were a ghost, Spike?"

He splurted a bit of blood around the mug, lowered it and glowered at her. "Why, in all that's devilishly devious and defiant about being a vampire, would I want to be a bleedin' ghost? Unable to drink, smoke, fight, eat and shag…watch? Those cormorants, sleek and beautiful in motion, flying through the air, gliding in to land to…"

Spike wound down to a halt as he looked at Dawn's knowing, arched eyebrow with added dose of smirk.

"Humour me?"

He paused and set his mug beside him, a tiny smile tugging at his lips. "Truthfully? Probably look up girls' skirts. Misplace the carpenter's hammer so he spent all morning looking for it. Tie the soldier's shoelaces together so that he falls over just as he's about to place a stupid, sloppy one on Buffy. That sort of thing."

Dawn rolled her eyes. "Really? That all you got?"

Spike tried his best not to look affronted. "Well. Haven't thought on it much. Give me a moment. Maybe I'll come up with something…What?" he asked, passing his hand through his crunching hair, in a gesture Dawn knew to mean that he was rattled.

"You're a hundred-plus year old vampire and you're seriously telling me you've never thought about this?" She leaned back on her hands.

"Bit. There are far more important things to think about like-"

"You are such a guy. No imagination."

He narrowed his eyes, menacing her slightly. "You got something better, huh?"

Dawn smiled gleefully. It was like taking cigarettes from a grumpy, microchip-restrained vampire.

Spike, the vampire ghost, glided idly through the streets of Modesto, California. He was disinterested, but not bored. Just needed something to pique his attention. The year was 1953.

He moved down Main Street, passing next to the people leaving offices and shops. They shuffled about beside him, moving to and fro, oblivious to his presence. But they weren't of interest to him. Walking a few more blocks, and taking a right and then a left, he came to Craddick Road. There it was, Number 41. He entered via the front window, bristling as the glass passed through his non-corporeal body. He lingered in his prey's house for about half an hour, running his fingers along her photos, moving through her small rooms, waiting for her to return from her day job as an operator at the town's switchboard. She was an ordinary girl, about five foot five, long, mousy blonde hair, brown eyes, nose a little too small for her face, compensated by a too large chin. The only thing that made her stand out physically was an ability to splay her feet as she walked, making it seem like she was a ballet dancer stepping around a stage.

Psychologically, though, was a whole different matter.

The girl had a secret, or rather something she felt was a curse, something she kept hidden deep below her memories. Now that her parents were dead, there were few to keep the memory alive and burning.

He watched, unrecognised, from the kitchen doorway as she entered the house, expelling air as she hung her coat on the rack and slipped out of her pointy office shoes and into her loafers. As she passed by the mirror in the hall, he flew behind her so that his black, leather coat became visible and caught at the periphery of her vision. He sensed her uncontrolled shiver as she continued down the hall.

She shuffled through to her small, poky living-room and immediately turned on the radio, flicking the knob around so that a sprightly show tune exploded into the stillness of the room. She sat down in an armchair and reached for a magazine, crossed her legs and tapped her elevated foot to the offbeat.

After five minutes or so, Spike sauntered quietly into the room and fiddled with the volume button, sending the room into an immediate hushed silence. The girl sat up with a start, a frown creased her forehead and she readjusted the set, then resumed her position.

Ten minutes later, Spike again flicked the switch. This time the girl's eyes flew open and she jerked into standing, moving hesitatingly toward the device and turned it back on. She picked it up, and shook it harshly, hoping the answer to her disquieting predicament lay hidden beneath.

Bored with his inability to get the reaction he wanted, Spike left the girl sitting in the room unmolested for a few hours. It wasn't until she was brushing her teeth in her bathroom, making 'o' shapes with her mouth, that he revisualised behind her. She bent down to spit out the sudsy water, turned around and screamed.

"Hello pet," he said. She immediately ran straight through him, fleeing both from the shock and the heightening terror.

"Now that's no way to treat a friend," he remonstrated, greeting her as she ran into her bedroom. She scrabbled around the bed to the little table beside it and jerked open the drawer. Inside was a knobbly stick, which she pulled out and then crossed across her body.

"Ah-ah," he said, moving forward and brushing the stick from her grip, making it spin in a high curving arc out of the reach of her grasping hands. She turned to run from the room, then, but he jumped and halted her steps by the intensity of his presence before her. "No you don't. Let's have this out here and now."

"Billy," she whispered, legs shaking beneath her flimsy cotton night dress, "let's not."

Spike smiled then, feral like a smitten cat, at her show of insecurity. His smile broadened into a laugh that caused her shaking to intensify.

"I've come for you, luv," he insisted, taking an indeterminate step toward her. "I've travelled all the way to this tiny, little, nondescript town to find you. Spend some meaningful time with you, like. Get to know some of your better qualities. The kind of time that involves a bit of torture, with a side serving of payback."

"Uncle made you a ghost," she stammered. "Can't do nothin' when you're not real."

"Oh pet. I've had time. Time in which to dwell and learn the ways of being a ghost. And in all that time I've had a focus. And do you know what that focus has been?"

She stared at him, her eyes bulging with fear, and, with a movement so sudden and so stunning, he rushed at her, flew at her with all his power and force, so that his cold fingers gripped her throat, and his weight pushed them back on the bed.

"You," he answered, lying on top of her, fingers dipping into her neck, rotating it so that she felt the bones crick in tension at the unnatural angle.

"Look at all the fancy tricks I've learnt. I can touch things, pet. I can move them. Twist them this way and that," and just to prove his point he shook her head on a diagonal tilt down her pillow, "bend reality to my desire."

"And d'you wanna know my desire, pet?" he asked, holding her firm as she bucked and wrestled furiously against the translucent weight his body impressed upon her.

As she opened her mouth, and as he felt the breath in her lungs gather for a loud, impotent scream, he wrenched her head, clean off her body, relishing the sound of bones smashing and blood gurgling.

"Revenge," he concluded to the mess of her headless body. Staring discontentedly at the blood he couldn't drink, he leapt off her bed and wandered through her bedroom wall, and on to the darkened, otherwise peaceful, street.

Contemplating the clouds as they shrouded the moon like a grey overcoat, he announced to the night air, "Three down. Two to go."

Spike snicked on his zippo, leaning down so the flame caught at the cigarette drooping from his mouth. "Hmm. I'll give you a few points for effort and execution. But you lose out on historical accuracy. Didn't have the coat back in '53."

Dawn gawped him and began, "Well, when did you -"

"'Nother time, 'nother place, 'nother moment when your sister won't go for my gonads for keeping you too long." When she didn't move, he enunciated clearly, "Run along home now Nibblet."

Dawn scowled at him, leapt off the stone slab and grabbed her bag. As she pulled open his door, made that much more difficult by her anger, he remarked, "Coulda pissed myself though. Got a knack there, sweetheart."

She couldn't wipe the smile from her face as she ran all the way home.

_Finis_


End file.
